Renowned Samoan visual artist, writer, curator and researcher, Dr Léuli Eshraghi, has been appointed as the curator for TarraWarra Museum of Art’s TarraWarra Biennial 2023, opening in April 2023.
TarraWarra Museum of Art Director, Victoria Lynn, said the appointment of Eshraghi to curate the TarraWarra Biennial 2023 is a continuance of the Museum’s commitment to ‘art as a world-making activity’.
“At this time of global upheaval, it is timely to appoint a person who provides an intellectual, nuanced and sensitive approach to the relationship between art making, race, knowledge and gender,” said Ms Lynn. “Dr Eshraghi is a rare combination of artist, curator, writer and academic who will make a unique contribution to the exhibition histories at TarraWarra.”
“Léuli Eshraghi has built a global profile in curatorial practice and museology in service of First Nations and racialised communities.”
“They are highly regarded for their work across the Pacific region, Southeast Asia and North America in Indigenous exhibition histories; language as a field of translation, innovation, anti-colonial and anti-racist experimentation; decolonial and multilingual art museum practices; reparations and repatriation of Ancestral Belongings; best practices in Indigenous arts management; and collaboration in research-creation based on colonial collections.
“Dr Eshraghi’s appointment to curate TarraWarra Museum of Art’s Biennial 2023 speaks to the Museum’s desire to present Australian art and contemporary issues in a global context,” said Ms Lynn.
Léuli Eshraghi, who divides their time between Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Australia, and Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), Canada, references their Samoan, Persian and Cantonese heritage in work that involves centring Indigenous kin constellations, sensual and spoken languages, and ceremonial-political practices.
Eshraghi’s art practice involves performance, moving image, writing and installation to engage with Indigenous futures as haunted by ongoing violences that once erased fa’afafine-fa’atane people from kinship and knowledge structures.
Eshraghi has previously curated projects including Pasapkedjinawong with John G Hampton at MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina, Samoan Hxstories, Screens and Intimacies at A Space Gallery, Toronto for imagineNATIVE; Écrans autochtones: temporalité et mouvement with Mylène Guay also within imagineNATIVE; ‘O le ua na fua mai Manu/a at UNSW Galleries, Sydney.
Other projects include Ua numi le fau at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne, and in a trilogy co-curated with Tarah Hogue, Lana Lopesi, Sarah Biscarra Dilley and Freja Carmichael; Transits and Returns at the Vancouver Art Gallery; Layover at Artspace Aotearoa, Auckland, and The Commute at the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane.
“We look forward to Léuli Eshraghi’s unique vision for the 8th iteration of the TarraWarra Biennial which will undoubtedly break new ground as well as build on TarraWarra’s ongoing commitment to art, place and ideas,” said Ms Lynn.
The TarraWarra Biennial 2021: Slow Moving Waters continues to 11 July. For more information, visit: www.twma.com.au for details.
Image: Léuli Eshraghi – photo by Rhett Hammerton